Christ After the Flagellation Contemplated by the Christian Soul

An episode joined to a viewer

The title names two things at once. The first is a moment of the Passion: Christ after the scourging, when the flagellation is over and the crowning with thorns has not yet begun. The second is not an event in the gospels at all — the Christian Soul is a personification, a figure standing for the person praying, placed inside the picture so that the act of contemplation is shown rather than assumed. Devotional painting used that device to close the distance between a historical scene and its viewer.

Where it falls in the Passion

Inside the praetorium, between the scourging and the mocking. Nine titles in this catalogue name the flagellation or the scourging; this is the one that takes the interval afterwards as its subject, which is a different scene from the beating itself.

The record

The catalogue gives Diego Velazquez, 1628, and the National Gallery, London. It measures 206.4 by 165.1 centimetres — over life size, and larger than most of the Passion entries in this catalogue that carry a measurement. The style is entered as Baroque and the artist as Spanish. The measured palette reads as brown. The record carries nothing on commission or ownership before London, so none is stated.